I wanted to have a good listing of software (or computers) related writings out of the web/blogs/jungle, and this looked like a good opportunity. But this ends up as a really short part on software (and with some good and some other texts not that good in comparison) and some longer parts on related subjects which — for a geek — are just plain boring.
Not sure to invest in any new volume…
So, if I want to write a new application with a frontent, I can either use:
Whee…
I have been using a few Wikis over the time, I even looked into the code of the engine of some to add some features and if somebody asked me which one I would choose to install, I could cite phpwiki, mediawiki, jspwiki, dokuwiki, trac, zwiki or even confluence (if you’re into this kind of software).
In a sense, Wikis are nice online easy-to-manipulate collaborative webpage creation tools.
One problem I have with wikis is that everything is based on linking. You usually have a main page, you write text and create links to new pages. From there, you create the pages, and so on. But if I have a wiki, sometimes I don’t feel like every page is related, even to a (de facto, human created) index. I could create an orphan page and find it back again later through the search engine, but this also seems unnatural.
The way I see it, it is related to mind-mapping except that most so-called mind-mapping softwares are graphical-display-oriented and local applications.
Other related approaches are the use of tags by some web applications (eg. GMail), or the everything-is-a-database (eg. winfs which was once a feature of Microsoft Longhorn). Another application of the tags can be seen with TextSnippets, where we can see a clear disadvantage in one presentation: the number of tags is growing and represents some kind of anarchy again.
[ to be continued… ]
After a bit of work, the design of the site is now is a little more to my taste (and different from basic WP).
So, I have moved my blog from my provider to another hosting site. While I feared it a bit, data transfer wasn’t that difficult (moving from an old Postgresql backed version to a newer mysql powered version). But now, I need to get back to my own look, because the theming system has changed.
[ Long time since the last post… But since then, I have seen some sun and goats, and I have crossed the line, I have joined the Dark Side, I’m not a sysadmin anymore, I’m a developer. ]
I have been using Eclipse and Emacs recently for C++ development, and although I have quite a good things to say about the former when writing Java code, I must also say that it lacks on a few points for C++: code formatting is less aggressive and refactoring is far less powerful.
With a few keyboard shortcuts and speedbar, Emacs is a good bet, and maybe someday I’ll be able to check out the CEDET Project for advanced (missing) features.
Doing C++, I can also say that I regret Java every now and then (C++ compilers are still a real pain regarding error diagnosis) and I won’t even talk about Ruby, Perl or Python.
I do not want to just say that I have been and will be still offline for some days, but I’m going to give a short summary of recent things:
Yay! Nerim fixed the problem with the use of path info by PHP. I am now able to use again permalinks with path-like structure rather than a plain old meaning-less URL with an obscure post id.